3.1 miles, y'all.

I began my year like many others do with a New Year's resolution and a plan to lose weight. I started running on January 2nd. I do this most January 2nd's. I start out the year eating healthy and exercising, only to fail about three weeks into it. This year I changed my mindset. I started running because not only did I need to get healthy and lose weight, I needed a hobby. So this year, running has not become just regular exercise to me. It is time to myself to sort through my thoughts and get inside my own head a couple of times a week. It is a chance for me to compete with myself and push the limits of what I thought I was capable of doing. If someone would have told me that I would be running three miles in a matter of a month, I would have told them to fuck off. Because I thought I knew myself pretty well, and running three miles is something that I have never been capable of doing in my life and it certainly was not anything I was willing to try.

But today, one month to the day of starting out on this journey, I ran 3.1 miles. I had been using Run Keeper and doing the Beginner 5k program on the app. Once I had gotten up to 2 miles, my brother kept telling me to just run three miles. Just do it. Quit being a pussy. His words, not mine. So today, I did. And it was not as scary as I thought it would be. It was not as hard as I thought it would be. That voice inside my head that is well versed in negative vocabulary got a little more quiet the further I went. She is slowly becoming non-existent with each run I take.

Not only is my body getting stronger, but my mind is too. For the first time the other day, I turned to running to relieve stress. I am sure most of you are aware that my job can be stressful at times (that really is the understatement of the fucking year). Shit sometimes weighs heavily on me and most of the time my outlet for this is having a couple or ten drinks. So I got home on Thursday and I was frustrated. I was in a piss poor mood and that voice I spoke of earlier was in high gear. I did not feel like running, I did not want to run. But I did. It took me about a mile or so to get with the program and to stop feeling sorry for myself. But I ran. And in the end I ended up improving my pace. And I got my endorphins going and I felt great afterwards. So along with goals like improving my pace and my distance, I do not want to ignore tiny victories like the one I had on Thursday.